JOD's terrible 'teens'

[Rankin, Robert L]

Sounds to me as if they didn't use '19' very often.  After all, we don't either except in dates from the 1900s.  They don't use glebaN agi shaNkka or something similar?

I did a Siouan Conference paper back in the 80s (or maybe it was the 70s) on Siouan counting and tried to show that the words correlated with the signs for the numbers in the Plains Sign Language.  This was a partial quinary system of finger counting beginning with the little finger of the left hand and ending with the little finger of the right.  This explained why Dakotan for '9' is 'one in the palm'.  I don't know how the finger counting system would work above 10 however.  It would be interesting to find out.  I don't recall ever seeing the PSL signs for numerals in the teens.  

The 'nine' word itself is a bit of a mystery.  It's found in both Siouan and Algonquian as 'shankka' or the like.  Ives Goddard thinks it's Siouan originally but I've speculated that it's Algonquian originally.  Nobody wants to claim the little bastard.

Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J Awakuni-Swetland
Sent: Tue 2/2/2010 10:45 AM
To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
Subject: JOD's terrible 'teens'
 
Aloha All,

I am working through Dorsey's numbers in the teens. 

He has several definitions for the base number that are not always all 
used on a number. For example:

nineteen

the other nine

the extra nine

again nine

I was wondering what y'all might make of this.

Mark


Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
and Ethnic Studies (Native American Studies)
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE 68588-0368

http://omahalanguage.unl.edu
http://omahaponca.unl.edu
Phone 402-472-3455
FAX: 402-472-9642